Gibraltar for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

We have a lot of customers using Gibraltar with the server-side Silverlight apps, but until now, you had to roll your own solution to get client-side log messages into Gibraltar. There were options such as using NLog or CLog to forward client-side messages to Gibraltar, but we didn’t provide any out-of-the-box capability for client-side logging.

We’ve just released sample code (both source and binary) that will ultimately form the basis for built-in Silverlight and Windows Phone support in a future version of Gibraltar. It supports Silverlight 3 & 4 as well as Windows Phone 7.x. You can use on binaries as-is (we even provide a NuGet package to make it super easy to integrate), or you can start with our implementation then tweak the code as you wish. Either way, it gives you an easy way to get a more complete picture from your Gibraltar logs today including both client- and server-side logging.

Please check out the bits and let us know what you think!

Understanding the Design
Our support for Silverlight comes in two parts: a client-side library that is a subset of the current Gibraltar.Agent shipping release, and a server-side AgentConnector that acts as the “message sink” for each Silverlight client that writes client-side messages to the Gibraltar log, which is then packaged up and pushed to the Hub and/or Analyst just as you would expect.

The Agent Connector is a REST-based WCF service that leverages WebActivator to automatically configure the service route, give you near-zero-config that will have you up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Log messages are continuously streamed from each client to your web application with client-side message buffering to ensure that no more than one outbound request to to the Agent Connector is active at once for each client. Server-side, each client is assigned a unique ID to make it easy to analyze multi-user behaviors and trace individual client sessions from Gibraltar Analyst.

Getting the Bits
There are two different ways you can get the code. The first is through NuGet.org. If you’re not familiar with NuGet, it is a free Visual Studio extension that manages assembly dependencies including automatic downloads and updates. The “Server” component of this design leverages NuGet to pull down Gibraltar.Agent, as well as WebActivator, so either way, you’ll want to check it out.

The second option is to download a zip file containing the same binaries included in the NuGet packages as well as the full source code, an end-to-end sample application and a ReadMe file with details on building and integrating the code.

Installing the Server Bits with NuGet
Your solution will likely have two parts, a Silverlight client app, and a Web Application. To start, you’ll want to have the NuGet Package Manager installed in VS2010. You’ll also want to have already configured the Gibraltar Agent on your web app. If you have not done so, please follow the directions on this page of our User’s Guide.

Right-click your web project, and select “Manage NuGet Packages”. In the resulting window, type “Gibraltar.Agent” into the search box in the top-right corner. You should be presented with a number of packages. Select ‘Gibraltar Agent for Silverlight – Server”. This will add the assembly references, as well as a clientaccesspolicy.xml file, to the root of your app. You can also open up the NuGet Package Console and type “Install-Package Gibraltar.Agent.Silverlight.Server”, which will accomplish the same thing.

Installing and Configuring the Client Bits with NuGet
Now right-click your Silverlight project, call up the NuGet Package Manager again, run the same search, and this time select the “Gibraltar Agent for Silverlight – Client” package. You can also open up the NuGet Package Console and type “Install-Package Gibraltar.Agent.Silverlight.Client”. After it installs the proper assemblies for your project type (the same package has the SL3, SL4, and WP7 binaries), there is one more thing you’ll need to do. You need to add the following string to the ResourceDictionary in your App.xaml file:

This value needs to be the root of your application, be it a domain, subdomain, or IIS application. This will be combined with the built-in WCF route auto-registered by the Server binaries (“/GibraltarAgentService/”, to be exact). Now, you should be able to use Gibraltar.Agent.Log just like you always have:

Log.TraceCritical("This is a critical message.");

Since multiple clients will likely be connected, the service assigns each IP address a unique integer ID, so you can easily track which messages come from which clients or have Gibraltar filter the view to only show messages from a single client. You’ll see results similar to the screenshot below:

Well, there you have it. Get the bits and tell us what you think. Even with this early sample, we’ve sought to make it as robust and forgiving as possible, in line with our goal to “First, Do No Harm”. Your feedback will help us extend and harden our Silverlight support and become an easy-to-use and rock-solid part of the standard distribution for a future Gibraltar version. So, if you find any issues, please do not hesitate to leave a comment and let us know.